Modern communications technologies have increasingly high demand for data traffic, and it is necessary to implement data transmission with higher MAC efficiency. Generally, MAC efficiency is used to indicate efficiency of transmitting a valid load by a network system, and higher MAC efficiency indicates less system overheads.
Generally, data is transmitted in a unit of frame in a network. A frame aggregation technology can be used to improve MAC efficiency. The frame aggregation technology means that in a scenario of one receive end, a transmit end splices multiple frames corresponding to the one receive end into one aggregation frame for transmission; and in a scenario of multiple receive ends, not only data frames to be sent to different receive ends need to be aggregated into one long frame at the transmit end for transmission, but also a packet header corresponding to each receive end needs to be added to the front of a data frame that is in the long frame and that is corresponding to the receive end, so that each receive end can determine, according to the packet header in the long frame, whether data following the packet header is data required by the receive end, so as to correctly receive data.
In the foregoing solution, corresponding packet headers need to be added for all the receive ends, and it is found through analysis that overheads are high in the foregoing solution, and the overheads increase linearly with an increase of a quantity of receive ends but only a limited gain can be obtained.